The big fight over spending

What we need to be clear about is that this big, highly publicized "High Midnight" showdown was only about the next six months of spending.

We now will have the same fight on a much larger scale as they negotiate the budget for the next fiscal year that begins in October.

Repubs are framing it in terms of the deficit and blaming the Dems for "runaway" spending. But they deliberately got us into this mess IN ORDER THAT they could justify cutting programs that violate their philosophy of government -- which is of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

Our current economic mess has three main causes: (1) Bush's trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthy; (2) Bush's near-trillion dollar wars; and (3) economic meltdown, which was initiated by zealous de-regulation in the financial industry, instigated by Reagen but aided and abetted by Clinton in his time.

So we can say that something like 80% of the blame goes to the Repubs. But they're hard at working selling the American people on the idea that it's all because of Dems' excess spending. Add to it their goal of "shrinking the size of government so that it's small enough to drown in a bathtub" -- and you can make the case that it was all planned to turn out this way.

Like: "Let's ruin the economy; then they'll HAVE to agree to our spending cuts; then we'll finally have gutted FDR's New Deal and LBJ's War on Poverty -- and returned the US to the 1920's wide income gap and unprecedented wealth -- for a few.

Ralph